In the United States, telephone service was historically provided almost exclusively by American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. (AT&T). Following deregulation of the telephone industry in 1984, AT&T was limited to providing long distance telephone service, and local telephone service was thereafter provided by the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), such as Bell Atlantic and BellSouth. Thus, following deregulation, the RBOCs served as the exclusive local exchange carriers (LECs), and maintained the subscriber loop between the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and each individual telephone subscriber.
In 1996, Congress enacted the Telecommunications Act (the “Act”) as part of an effort to foster competition in the local telephone industry. Interpretations and enforcement of key portions of the Act were placed in the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC quickly set forth regulations requiring incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) to allow any requesting telecommunications carriers, or competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), to utilize the ILEC's networks to establish a market presence in a region while the CLEC builds its own physical network. These regulations require ILECs to make their network components available using a variety of approaches in which a CLEC purchases service bundles or individual service components from the ILEC and resells those services, as originally bundled, as rebundled by the CLEC or individually, to the CLEC's customers.
The FCC required ILECs to offer collocation space, in some form, to CLECs as early as 1991, but the Act redefined collocation space requirements. As part of the Act's mandate, an ILEC must allow CLECs access to the ILEC's central offices (COs) and provide space in those COs, known as collocation space, for CLEC equipment. A CLEC, for example, may lease certain unbundled elements of the ILEC's network at reduced rates for resale. The CLEC may lease an unbundled port on an end office switch as a point of access to the ILEC's switch and the subscriber loops. The CLEC then connects its own switch network to the unbundled port. Alternatively, the CLEC may operate its own independent switching facilities and loop plant. In either case, the regulatory requirements mandate that the CLEC facilities must be integrated into the PSTN in a seamless manner from the customer's perspective. As such, customers must be able to make and receive telephone calls using existing dialing patterns, without any apparent distinction in processing as a result of service through the CLEC. The regulatory environment therefore places certain burdens on the ILEC to provide an efficient interconnection to the CLEC's facilities and to provide mechanisms for compensation between the parties for calls interconnected between the two carriers' networks.
The interconnection contemplated by the Act provides nondiscriminatory access or interconnection to such services or information as is necessary to allow the requesting CLEC to implement local dialing parity, including access to telephone numbers, operator service, directory assistance, and directory listing, with no unreasonable dialing delays. Federal regulations require that ILECs provide CLECs with a way to request these services as well as the necessary collocation space in the ILEC's CO. For instance, if there is a CO in which a CLEC wants to locate its equipment, the CLEC must complete an application for collocation space and specific federal rules and regulations mandate how and when the ILEC must respond. Among the federal regulations are specified time limits or intervals for standard work activities such as the interval from application submit date to ILEC response date. These time limits may be as short as a few days, such that even a one day delay can become significant.
Previously, a CLEC completed a paper collocation application and sent the completed application by mail, fax, or e-mail to an account team of the ILEC. If there were errors made by the CLEC in submitting the request, the account team was responsible for contacting the CLEC to verify and/or correct the information. The account team then sent the application to applicable field organizations or groups of the ILEC. Copies of applications had to be faxed or shipped next-day air to multiple sites in the region in order to meet the regulatory mandated date intervals. Because there were so many applications being handled manually, applications were often lost or misplaced and an arduous tracking process had to be implemented to ensure proper handling.
Each applicable field group was responsible for providing any information required of it, based on the collocation application, and entering the necessary data into a simple spreadsheet or on paper. The collective information provided by all of the applicable field groups formed the basis for a response to the CLEC. Once the ILEC sent a response, the CLEC replied by paper with a firm order if it wished to order the allocated collocation space. The paper process is faulty for numerous reasons, including time delays, poor handwriting, inaccurate math, and impossible or inconsistent data parameters entered by the CLEC.
The manual, paper-based environment was improved somewhat through the use of PCs and spreadsheets that multiple field groups could access. However, variations still exist because numerous parties are involved in the process and the information is spread among many PCs and is not centrally located. High employee turnover is another problem for CLECs. Because of the high volume of turnover, CLECs do not know with certainty whether a collocation application was sent, what attachments may have been included with the application, where copies of relevant documents were filed, etc. The manual, paper-based and spreadsheet-based systems and methods are simply too labor intensive and prone to errors.
Therefore, there is a need for methods and systems of automating the collocation application process using a computer network where applications for collocation space are processed, responses are generated, firm orders are submitted, and work is provisioned efficiently and accurately.